Dropping balls

The first thing I want to say to you is ‘Thank You’ – thank you for the lovely healing vibes and messages on my FB page for the pooch. I’m pleased and relieved to be able to tell you he’s had his exploratory surgery and is back at home with me, resting and healing and hopefully on his way to a full recovery. We’re still waiting for tests results, so if you can spare another healing thought for the best outcome possible, that would be awesome.

Looking back on last week, I realise that the change from stress-bucket to milder smaller stress-bucket (I can’t say I’m completely calm, because that’s only going to happen when my fur-baby is back to full health) happened towards the end of a crazy week.

After I told you about the pooch going into surgery, I had to focus on him and only him. In doing so I had to force myself to drop all the other balls I was juggling. You might recognise some of them, but even if you don’t you’ll recognise the pattern – you might be juggling with different balls but I’m pretty sure you’re juggling.

My particular balls have been the contract, the dog, the new book, the current book, an online course, housework, eating more healthily, socialising with friends, seeing my family, reading, social media, a garden full of weeds. And that’s just the jumble of larger balls that come to mind.

But juggling them all became impossible and on Thursday morning, as I dropped the pooch off for his surgery, I also very quickly started dropping balls too. I didn’t have the time, energy or focus to keep juggling them all. So all but the most important ones, the ones that I needed to keep juggling to get me through the next few days, got dropped. And it felt like such a huge relief not to have to worry about them. (Although it took a conversation with my coach to drop the ‘Guilt’ ball – that one kept bouncing back up trying to claim my attention for a while).

That’s what I want to share with you today – we all spend most of our time frantically juggling a whole load of balls. When something big happens, it shocks us out of that pattern and we drop a few balls. That’s ok, it’s perfectly natural and necessary for us to be able to cope with the ‘something big’. But what happens when we’re done coping, and we’re ready to juggle again? The tendency is to pick up all the balls we had going, and resume our impressive but exhausting juggling act again.

I’m not sure that’s what we should be doing though.

Maybe what we need to do, you and I, is to look at each dropped ball and decide whether it’s really worth adding to our pile again. For example, that bouncy little (or often not so little) ‘Guilt’ ball – do we really need that one? Probably not, it’s just sneaked in there and become part of the action.

Once I’m ready to pick up the dropped balls, I think I might take a little time to pick and choose which ones I actually want in my personal juggling act – not all of them will make it back in. And that’s ok. What about you? Which balls will you drop?